Blair v. Hitchens poll

Tonight, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens will debate on whether religion is a force for good. I’d love to hear Hitchens on that subject, but Blair? That’s almost as comical as having Hitchens debate Bush on the subject. The newspapers are relying on two tools to promote the event. Hype:

Together, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens are two of the great British thinkers on religion.

Wait, Blair…isn’t he the simpering me-too former prime minister who was our American lackey in the UK? The one who converted to Catholicism, an act that clearly marks him as mentally deficient? Hmmm.

Oh, well. The second tool is the online poll:

Is religion a force for good in the world?

Yes 17%
No 83%

They haven’t even had the debate yet and Hitchens is already winning!

This’ll settle the current atheist/skeptic argument: a poll!

The current silly Skepticon controversy is easily resolved: just vote on it.

How much of a so-called skeptic convention can be about religion?

None 0% (0 votes)

No more than 25% 0% (0 votes)

No more than 50% 0% (0 votes)

Just so long as it isn’t all of it 25% (3 votes)

All of it, why not? 75% (9 votes)

Nicely done. There’s only one choice that isn’t arbitrary and incoherent and unjustifiable; I’d like to see the complainers confront the specific details of their position.

Oh, and by the way, I haven’t escaped Missouri yet — I’m stuck in an airport, waiting to fly out, and facing the prospect of some fierce, nasty, icy weather in Minnesota. I might be holing up in a hotel waiting for the snow and ice to clear tonight.

An online abortion poll — for real

I’m about as pro-choice as you can get; I’m even willing to say that I’m pro-abortion, and would like to encourage more people to abort. But I’m also rather shocked by my fellow Minnesotans, Pete and Alisha Arnold, who have decided to allow people to vote on whether they should get an abortion. Way to trivialize a significant life decision, Pete and Alisha!

They have an online poll, and you can go vote right now.

Should We Give Birth or Have an Abortion?

Give Birth 77.3% (118,301 votes)

Have an Abortion 22.7% (34,741 votes)

Clearly, looking at those numbers, the ‘bots have been at work, trivializing the poll even more. I don’t care how you vote; what’s at stake is a mere embryo, so it’s no big loss if it’s flushed and incinerated, and I don’t have any illusions about whether this is deciding the fate of a human life — it’s not. There’s no person in Alisha’s belly yet.

I have deep reservations about voting on this at all, because it is not and should not be my decision. But I had to vote to abort, not because of any consideration about the embryo, but because I’m looking at Pete and Alisha, the full-grown, conscious, decision-making human beings who are considering whether to take on the responsibilities of a child. And no, they are not. I’d say the same thing to someone who decided whether to have a baby or not by a flip of the coin. If that’s how you make decisions about whether to commit a significant part of your life to a lot of hard work and the emotional roller coaster of child-rearing, then NO, you do not want to do it.

They’re already lousy parents, and they haven’t even created a child yet.

As several have already pointed out, this poll is not “for real”. It’s the work of a couple of libertarian anti-choice frauds. So go ahead, vote however you want, it doesn’t matter and the perpetrators are a pair of morons.

The War on Christmas will be waged on the field of internet polls

It’s telling that kooks like Bill O’Reilly can turn purple with rage if you say “happy holidays” to them, seeing affront in friendliness. You know, It doesn’t matter — so why do we need a poll to find out if some jerks want to dictate how you say hello?

How do you feel when you hear “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas?”

I prefer it 21%
I don’t care much either way 34%
It bothers me 45%

I suggest that everyone who is offended by being told either “happy holidays” or “merry christmas” should start wearing a little sign so we know not to hurt their delicate little feelings by using the wrong salutation. Instead, we’d greet them by thrusting a middle finger up at them and shouting, “Up yours!”

You’ve got to be kidding me

Do you detect the little scientific and logical problem in this press release about a new prayer study?

A ground-breaking online study was recently initiated to discover if Americans believe prayer has a place in medicine. Shannon Pierotti, a graduate student at USciences, is using a social networking basis for recruiting participants in a National survey to assess attitudes regarding the inclusion of spirituality and prayer in medical practice.

What’s “ground-breaking” about that? She’s simply using an online poll, advertised on religious sites, to ask if respondents believe that magical incantations have a medical benefit. What’s the point? We know how people will respond, and it’s completely meaningless, except as a confirmation that religious people think religion matters.

And the rationale sucks.

Findings from an extensive scientific literature review showed a need for data from a United States survey to determine whether further progress towards standardization of a holistic approach in medical clinical practice is indicated through the incorporation of spirituality by introducing spiritual assessment tools and resources for patients that include use of prayer and its associated benefits.

That’s impressively vacuous.

Go ahead. Take the survey. I think they need input from a few people who are not credulous, gullible loons. It’s only a few pages long, and the questions are easy — they ask how likely you are to ask your doctor for spiritual aid, for instance. Let’s make sure they’ve got a whole bunch of people responding who reject all that nonsense.

Fear and pain, the great educational motivators

I remember my physical education class in high school — the instructor (I will not dignify him with the title “teacher”) was a psychopath, as far as I was concerned. He ran the class like a petty tyrant; members of the football team were treated royally and given exemptions and privileges, while the rest of us were subject to his whims and rather vicious rules. We had jock strap inspections every day, and if we were unequipped, we’d be punished; we had to, for instance, run a certain number of laps around the track, and the students who came in last would be punished. And punishment was always the same: we’d be paddled. Not gently, but great walloping strikes with a perforated chunk of wood shaped like a cricket bat. We would be hit so hard that Old Man Earl would actually frequently break the bat on our butts, so he had a stockpile of them in his office. Once he decided to wack every student in the class for some annoying infraction, and he went through three or four of them, covering the gym floor with splinters and broken chunks of wood.

I’m surprised, looking back, on the horrors the PE teacher could get away with because he was the coach of a winning public school football team; I’m most surprised, though, that we actually let it happen, and it was unthinkable at the time to stand up to the blustering, crew-cutted, 6½ foot tall lunatic and tell him that he was a disgrace and ought to be fired.

But I had it good. I was living in Washington state, not Alabama. I also got out of PE classes as quickly as possible and focused on the science courses, which were far more reasonably run. Trust me, you never, ever want to take an academic course from the local coach of brutal team sports.

Now I’ve read this account of one public school teacher in contemporary Alabama.

Payton attends Plainview Elementary and is in the seventh grade. Recently, Lewis claims her son came home from school with severe bruises and welts on his behind. Melissa Lewis said her son was upset, “Mom look at my butt and see if there is something wrong with it? He dropped his pants and I said wow what happened? He said I got paddled because I did not pass my science test.”

Whoa. What possible pedagogical purpose does physical punishment have in a science course? I suppose I could stand up in front of my class and tell them that if they don’t master simple Mendelian genetics right now, I’ma gonna cut a beeyatch, but I don’t think it would have a positive effect on learning.

Anyway, the teacher has apparently been doing this for years. The response so far? Teachers have been sent a letter “discouraging” the use of corporal punishment in the classroom, but it’s still allowed. Why? Don’t ask me. Maybe it’s because the locals are all ignorant thugs, an idea supported by the online poll on the article.

Should Congress ban the use of corporal punishment in the classroom?

Yes, it has no place in the classroom

24%

No, things are fine the way they are
38%

Leave it up to the schools to decide

15%

More guidelines need to be established

23%

Hmmm. How about if teacher and administrator performance reviews were motivated by the presence of a big grinning maniac of a football coach, equipped with a big stick or switch, and anyone who didn’t come up to snuff would get a vigorous thrashing? Views on the allowability of corporal punishment might change a little faster.

Back to the debate with you!

A few days ago, sent you off to vote on a debate on genetically-modified crops, a debate that has continued onwards.

We didn’t quite pharyngulate this poll; it has gone back and forth, and now the anti-GMO forces have a pretty good lead. One reason that we didn’t pound it into the ground is that there was some dissension here, even — I think a fair number of the people who read about it here went off to vote for the antis. And then, also, I’ve learned that the anti-GMO gang organized their own opposition (which is perfectly fair!), which I suspect voted with much more unity than the gang from here.

Anyway, I have obtained some top secret email from the organic gang’s mailing list, shown here for your amusement:

The Economist has a GM debate sponsored by BASF: “This house believes that biotechnology and sustainable agriculture are complementary, not contradictory.”

We’re currently losing and the debate rounds up in the next 48 hours.

Please vote now and vote NO – and tell everyone you know to do the same.

Message from Phil Chandler

Please – show the GM industry what you think of them with just one click – no signup, name or email needed – just go here – http://tinyurl.com/3yk4xj6 and vote AGAINST the motion.

I suspect this has been worded in an attempt to ask a ‘soft’ question, which sounds harmless, so that people will be fooled into agreeing with it. But the fact is that GM and sustainable agriculture are NOT compatible, or complementary, as the very presence of GM in an open space means that organic and other non-GM crops will inevitably be contaminated. This is happening wherever GM crops are grown, and is well-documented. American farmers who were sold on GM ten years ago are now turning against it – listen to my podcast at http://biobees.libsyn.com for evidence of this.

Don’t be fooled by industry propaganda: GM crops are TOTALLY INCOMPATIBLE with sustainable agriculture.

This is not a definitive survey, but it is run by The Economist and will be used by the media as ‘evidence’ one way or the other.

So please, if you care about keeping our food and our bees GM-free – VOTE AGAINST THIS MOTION – http://tinyurl.com/3yk4xj6 – they don’t need your name or email address, and it only takes a second.

Thanks,
Phil Chandler
www.biobees.com

I’ve found the comments even more entertaining. There’s lots of nonsense like this:

Science and nature are two parallel things. There is no comparison between sustainable Agriculture (SA) and GMOs. In SA production of food is almost natural. There is no destruction of nature and the environment remains clean. GMO is a science which tampers with biodiversity and eventually breaking the environmental cycles. The world doesn’t need food produced using science rather it requires food produced using natures own ingredients.

You might want to revisit the debate and notice who is backing up all their arguments with citations of the peer-reviewed literature, and that most of the opposition to GMOs is coming from people who have this bizarre view that science is unnatural…that is, science up to the level that they are currently using is natural, but anything beyond that, anything newer, is somehow destroying nature.

Polling the anti-GM vote

There’s a debate going on in The Economist. Pamela Ronald is defending the proposition that biotechnology and sustainable agriculture are complementary, not contradictory, which is weird: agriculture is biotechnology, and just breaking ground with a sharp stick and throwing some seeds in is an example of an ‘unnatural’ human practice. I don’t understand how the opposition can make a case, especially when this is their opening statement:

Biotechnology is not a system of farming. It reflects no specific philosophy nor is it guided by a set of principles or performance criteria. It is a bag of tools than can be used for good or evil, and lots in between.

Yes? And? It’s a tool, sure, but that can’t possibly be an objection to a tool being unusable for sustainable agriculture. And focusing on genetically modified plants is odd: all of our crops are genetically modified, often beyond recognition. Modern corn looks almost nothing like teosinte, and is the product of thousands of years of human meddling with crops…this argument reduces to a complaint that the very subtle fine-tuning of specific genes with modern molecular techniques is somehow more troubling than the wholesale radical modification of a whole species by extreme artificial selection. I just don’t get it, unless it’s just some crazy Luddite bias. There are legitimate complaints about how agribusiness can use genetic modification to lock up strains for selfish economic reasons, but the topic of the debate isn’t about abuses of the technique — it’s about the potential for genetic engineering to improve sustainability.

Anyway, it’s a debate with an internet poll attached to it, and so far the kneejerk organic anti-GMO side has a slight edge, 54% to 46%. Read, assess the arguments, and vote yourself.

Bad Faith awards

The New Humanist is handing out an award for the most egregious contributions to irrationalism and superstition, the Bad Faith awards, and you can vote! This is going to be a tough one, because every one of the nominees deserves an acknowledgment of their inanity.

It does have a bit of an English bent, so you might be unfamiliar with some of the names…but the voting page also has a brief description of each person’s crime against reason.

Lauren Booth 7.33% (25 votes)

Prince Charles 9.09% (31 votes)

Pastor Terry Jones 9.09% (31 votes)

Cardinal Walter Kasper 4.69% (16 votes)

Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed 18.18% (62 votes)

Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi 15.25% (52 votes)

Baroness Warsi 20.53% (70 votes)

Ann Widdecombe 15.84% (54 votes)